The Reign of the Favored Women

by Ann Chamberlin

  “Then you must make her speak or all Constantinople will suspect it is a man you hide in your harem. I leave you to wager how long you may remain Grand Vizier with that shame on your head.”

  My master took a breath and went to the mabein door. He knocked very gently and had to clear his throat to get the words out.

  “Fatima! Fatima!” he called. As if he’d called her Maria in Venice! That name was so common it probably arose suspicion in and of itself. My master was so transparently naive about women!

  “Fatima, there are men here.” Best he warn his secretary at least, if he could do nothing else. “There are men from the palace and they would hear you speak. To make certain you are...what I say you are. It is a matter of honor. And of life and death. Fatima, can you come to the door and say something?”

  There was no reply.

  “She is modest,” my master protested, but the soldiers were not satisfied.

  “Let me go in and encourage her with the gravity of the situation,” I offered.

  “No,” the captain grabbed my arm. “You may be in on this hoax, khadim. It would be only too easy for you to open the harem door and let some slave girl in to speak for ‘her.’ No, either that person you say is in there speaks up by the count of ten or I shall be obliged to break down the door in the name of the Sultan.”

  “Sir,” said my master. “I ask you to recall that this is not the mountains of Yugoslavia where a soldier may lose discipline with impunity. Violence against virtuous women of the Faith can be death.”

  “And shielding a man wanted by the Sultan is also death. I think the odds are even. At least I am not afraid of the wager. Are you, Pasha? I am a great man of the gamble, by Allah. Men, prepare to force the door on the count of ten!”

  And the captain began to count.

  “Fatima, please. Won’t you come and speak? Spare both of us the shame of this violence.”

  My master was pleading, and it was not an edifying sight in the person of the Grand Vizier. What he was pleading for I supposed to be the quick escape of Feridun Bey out through the mabein courtyard. But then where? Nothing else, short of a miracle, could be hoped for.

  Perhaps it was the same blind hope for heaven’s intervention that kept me rooted to the spot. To bolt at that moment, to run around through the other doors and make an escape for the fugitive through the harem, though there might be time before the door was broken down, would be a clear expression of guilt. And somehow I continued to believe that right might still win heaven’s protection.

  The door tore off its hinges and the soldiers burst in with drawn swords. My heart sank. The figure in the apricot veil had not even bothered to flee, but stood cowering in a corner. This took the soldiers aback for a moment, too. They had fully expected a man with a drawn sword to meet them. Still, they were convinced of their purpose. The captain, backed by his men, strode across the room and caught the apricot figure by one swathed arm.

  As he pulled the veil tight, one could see the light swelling of young breasts beneath. Then a voice no one could doubt as a woman’s cried out, “Please, sir. For my sake and yours. Let me go.”

  Had I still been the Christian I was born, I would never have believed it, even seeing it with my own eyes. Five armed men turned and fled for their lives from that cowering female figure as if from an army of thousands. My master made a sign. I was to have his bodyguard cut them off at the gateway. As I ran to carry out this scenario from a battlefield—excitement I thought Fate had deprived me of forever—I laughed aloud.

  And I also saw, out of the corner of my eye, the master move clumsily to embrace that apricot-swathed figure. For both of us had recognized the voice at once when it spoke. It was Gul Ruh.

  The violators were apprehended and the master assured of vengeance. The captain would be hanged to deprive Uweis of one of his most devoted cohorts and the others would be beaten soundly to teach them some proper Muslim manners.

  I fully expected a beating myself—for being so careless of a princess of the blood-—but the master and his secretary were exulting too much over this narrow escape to bother with me. I passed them, laughing and clipping one another on the shoulder in the mabein courtyard where Feridun Bey, still absurd in women’s jacket and trousers, had hidden himself. I passed on into the harem, realizing that the punishment I expected from others I would mentally give myself over and over in the weeks and months to come.

  For I had felt in my belt and found the key to the mabein missing. Gul Ruh must have stolen it to satisfy her curiosity during our embrace. For having been so careless, for having succumbed to women’s wiles—in my condition!—I would have loved the bite of a studded lash.

  “All right, young lady,” I said, turning some of my anger against her. “I’d like you to give an accounting of yourself.”

  “Me, Abdullah?” She played innocent. “Whatever have I done? I’ve been quietly playing chess with my khadim Carnation all this while. Isn’t that right. Carnation?”

  And Carnation, my assistant who was just coming to see normally again since his last pipeful, assured me she spoke the truth.

  That liar I motioned from the room, telling him I’d deal with him later.

  Then I turned to her and began to lecture, “Young ladies should never—”

  She interrupted me. “ ‘Young ladies should never!’ But how are we supposed to learn to behave ourselves when men are allowed into our sanctuary?”

  “He wasn’t in the harem. He was only in the mabein,” I protested, but I knew she had a point.

  “That’s still the harem.”

  “The door was safely locked, and well you know it.”

  “I suppose you’ll be wanting the key back,” she said, and, pulling it from her bodice, dangled it enticingly in front of me. When I reached for it, she pulled back and said, “But first you must tell me who he is.”

  I shook my head.

  “I saved his life. Surely I have a right to know who he is.”

  My heart was working up a sweat. I thought I saw the glimmer of romance in her eyes and the scene I imagined to have happened in that room before the soldiers burst in grew more and more torrid in my mind.

  “You have no business. You have no right,” I declared in panic.

  But as we bantered back and forth, I soon came to discover I was the only one who saw romance there. She had had time to stare a second or two at the equally startled Bey-—no more.

  “I didn’t dare to use the key until you’d gone into the selamlik, Abdullah,” she said, “and suddenly, there was the pounding of the soldiers on the door.

  “How funny he looked”—not handsome—” a man in women’s clothes. He didn’t look at all comfortable and was only too glad to see me, especially when he could toss that veil to me and run out into the yard in an instant.”

  Gul Ruh had boosted herself into a window sill to stand her ground against my scolding. Here she could swing her legs back and forth defiantly. Now a blush came to her cheeks and a tear to her eye and I feared once more that there might be some awful confession. “You know, Abdullah, that’s the only time my father has touched me since he sent me in here.” That was what would remain as the most important aspect of that evening to her.

  I decided to conclude my lecture, picking up on her sentiment for her father. “Now you must promise me you will never go opening doors you shouldn’t or climbing on rooftops again. It is your father’s honor we have at stake here. If you do not come pure to the husband he may someday, Allah willing, choose for you in his great love and concern, you will break his heart.”

  She nodded her head, the tears too thick now for speech. She kicked her heels against the wall instead, and the repentant, sweet yet impish picture so touched me that I embraced her. We each took in that embrace more than reality could ever give; she, the love of a cold and clumsy father and I, the love of the child my loins would never bear.

  * * *

  Sokolli Pasha realized now he could not hope to keep
his faithful Feridun Bey in the harem until the Sultan’s rage over the trumped-up charge should pass. And so, before the next Friday, I had escorted the secretary, still in sedan chair and apricot veil, as far as the master’s farm outside the city, where he gratefully changed into male attire at last, took a horse, and rode into exile.

  Feridun Bey carried letters with him to Mustafa Pasha, the master’s nephew who was beglerbeg, governor, over the difficult border territory around Buda. If Mustafa could not find a place for the secretary in some out-of-the-way Hungarian village, then he would certainly be able to help him across the border into Christian territory until such time as Allah should change Murad’s heart.

  I cannot tell you what a relief the apricot veil’s disappearance brought to my lady. “I knew it. Such a silly thing. I knew he’d soon grow tired of her.” And because Esmikhan was relieved, the harem in general was relieved.

  And Sokolli Pasha went to his room and wrote another very long letter to Arab Pasha in Cyprus.

  PART IV: FERHAD

  XXXVII

  The Master of the Imperial Horse strode across the hoof-churned dust of the Hippodrome to where the group of horsemen were practicing. Their efforts focused on an exhibition exercise to be performed at night in which rags dipped in saltpeter were lashed on shield, sword, and helmet, then set afire. It always made a grand spectacle, but as for practical application, little was accomplished more than training the horses not to balk at flame.

  Ferhad Pasha had just come from the other side of the field where practice with the more useful but not so showy skills of lance and target was an utter shambles. The incompetence bothered him much worse than usual, he knew, because they were in the Hippodrome, the very shadows of the Grand Vizier’s palace just shortening off man and beast. Anything to do with Sokolli Pasha must always have that effect on him.

  What chance that the Grand Vizier had nothing better to do than to look out his palace gate and decide which units were hopelessly incompetent, by implication which commanders? Ferhad Pasha had no real need to drive the men so hard as he always did in this milieu. Shouting, swearing at them, calling on Allah to witness his grief, driving them through the same moves like a fury, over and over again until he could see their limbs quake with exhaustion and their eyes blaze with murder. When the time came, Ferhad hoped, that blaze could be turned against the enemy rather than against himself.

  Of course, what Ferhad Pasha felt like spurs to his flanks was not the eyes of Sokolli Pasha alone. There was also Sokolli Pasha’s harem, his wife, his daughter. Ferhad felt his neck and shoulders warm at the mere thought. He knew one man had no business thinking of another’s harem, especially not in such particular terms. But Ferhad couldn’t help himself. The wife was his wife, the daughter his as well.

  Sometimes while at drill in the Hippodrome, he would catch a glimpse of the closed sedan as it left the rear harem door. It would never do to stare: How could he expect discipline from his men if he himself were as undisciplined as that? Yet he did not need to train his eyes. He could feel the progress of the sedan skirting the training ground. It moved like a branding iron across his back, turned his head like a spiked bit.

  And as the unseen sight burned his back, the men before him would shift at their commander’s unusual distraction. He’d watch himself lose control within the tight confines of his mind and there was nothing he could do about it. All the wonderful night in the holy city of Konya would come flooding back to him. Only when he extracted himself from the fit could his fierce attention to duty return. Indeed, then he would triple its intensity.

  The irony of the whole affair was that Ferhad Pasha had never, never sought to do anything that wasn’t duty. It was while he had been about the most secret of trusted duties that he had first found himself a guest in Sokolli Pasha’s home. A guest of enforced inactivity with nothing to do but wander in the Grand Vizier’s garden until, all inadvertently, he had found himself standing before a pavilion draped with autumn roses. Within had sat his host’s wife, playing the oud and singing songs of ancient and mythic love. She was those myths made corporal. A vision, he’d always thought, of paradise.

  And no more than Allah’s offer of paradise—or martyrdom on the battlefield—could he escape the conclusion of that scene. All was, in the end, Allah’s will. Seeking refuge in duty only set him ever more firmly in Allah’s hands.

  It had seemed a duty, a compulsion, to pick the flowers by whose secret code lovers communicate and leave them where the harem grille could read the meaning. Ferhad had read poets who had felt the same obligation to write or perish at the wrathful hands of their muse.

  Through duty again he had found his unit back in Konya—at the very time the Grand Vizier’s lady had been there, begging in the most pious way for Allah to take her in His hand as well. When winter in the mountains had called his unit back to Konya, how could Ferhad, with a guest’s duty, have refused the governor there his duty of hospitality? Yes, even in the full knowledge that Sokolli Pasha’s woman was likewise a guest under the same roof.

  And the eunuch Abdullah had come to Ferhad Pasha that night, un-customarily distracted, speaking disjointedly of the lady’s attempts to do violence to herself in her hopeless grief. How could he, Ferhad Pasha, a slave of the Sultan’s house, have resisted the duty to answer such a call to aid?

  Images of that night came back to him at the most inopportune times. Blissful images. Esmikhan’s pink-tipped breasts splitting free of their confining silk with the same fragrance as roses. Her black curls had been like jasmine tendrils, the sticky taste of her like honey.

  He’d known she was no virgin. She’d borne the Grand Vizier three sons, none of whom had lived through two prayer times. But he’d seen by the wide, surprised delight in her eyes, by their pupils’ dizzy blackness and the fresh bloom on her cheeks, that he’d been able to give her something she’d never known before. And that had fueled his own delight.

  The memory of her shuddering beneath him could make him shiver on the warmest days. A seagull’s cry would sometimes sound so like her own that it took his breath away, even as her desperately panting mouth had stolen it from him on that night.

  As for his own needs, well, he’d paid high-priced whores since then, coming with great recommendations from his comrades. And all their skill had come nowhere near granting him a similar satisfaction.

  There was the child now, the daughter of that night. Gul Ruh. His daughter. She’d be ten years old by now. More. Only such calculations placed the night its proper distance from the present. Otherwise, it seemed no more removed than the last dawn.

  The daughter he’d never seen. He liked to imagine she favored her mother: a rose, soft and pink. That was her name, Gul Ruh, the rose in the enclosed garden which the nightingale was forbidden to love.

  There was, of course, no reason why she shouldn’t favor him. He realized that, particularly every time he felt Sokolli Pasha’s sharp scrutiny. Sometimes Ferhad Pasha felt the old man did more than guess. He knew.

  Yes, the daughter would be ten, a young lady, well-guarded and in veils. Ferhad Pasha doubted he could tell mother from daughter or from any other woman if he saw them now so swaddled. And, of course, there was no opportunity to test that ability. Abdullah the eunuch had closed the harem doors behind him as dawn had leaked into the sky, putting an end to the night. And ever since then, Abdullah, who had once opened the doors of paradise, now stood a guardian as stern and unflinching as ever flaming-sworded archangel stood before Eden.

  Time ought to have faded the memories somewhat, brought new loves, new diversions. In other men, perhaps. Not in Ferhad Pasha. And other men might have hated Sokolli Pasha for lording that paradise which clearly belonged to Ferhad, none other. But the young Master of the Horse had no such feelings. Obedience continued to force his thoughts. His superior had rights to these blessings because no man in the empire, nay, in the world, was as submissive to duty as Sokolli Pasha was. The Grand Vizier deserved his post and eve
rything that went along with it—including the family—because he had paid his due to the Sultan and to Allah.

  Paradise, Ferhad knew, could not be besieged and taken. It must be earned, by the will of heaven. And by strict adherence to duty. That was, after all, how he had gained his one glimpse of the place.

  And so Ferhad continued to strive to match his service to the old man’s own, hoping in the end to inherit that man’s reward. It might well be. If he were faithful enough. The Grand Vizier—no matter how many times one said “May he live ‘til Judgment Day” after his name—could not, after all, live forever. And already Ferhad Pasha was one of the handful of men standing to inherit. He was, in fact, the only possible heir as yet unrewarded with a royal bride. And he had not married lower, finding, in his memories, no need to. Knowing that those who married lower never advanced.

  There was only one royal bride in which he had any interest. And the constraint of monogamy seemed no hardship.

  The Grand Vizier could not live forever. But still, as Ferhad walked to the fire riders, he thought, Death should come no sooner than Allah wills—to anyone. And, considering the message he bore, he would have dragged his feet to the fire more slowly, more slowly. Except, of course, he would rather be seen, by the Grand Vizier as well as by any shadow peeking at him through sedan lattices, to be overseeing the more flawless unit rather than the clumsy lance throwers.

  Ferhad Pasha’s nose twitched horse-like at the smell of sulphur just barely fumigating the training ground of its usual dust and manure. Burning swords passed just fingers’ breadth from the horses’ tails, which were tied up against sparks. The precision the team displayed as he approached was quite remarkable even by daylight and Ferhad wondered idly why this exercise always attracted the best men and their mounts.

  Ferhad motioned the head of the fire unit to him. The ranks closed in over the place the man vacated like magic. The man rode his horse at a canter past the water trough, where he doused his flaming equipment with a flourish. Then he pranced his horse up to where Ferhad stood, showing his animal off to best advantage.